Summary: The unemployed in the United States appear to allocate time to job search activities regardless of the stance of the economy. Drawing on the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2014, I document that the unemployed increase their search intensity only slightly if at all during recessions. Roughly, 30 minutes in a week is the additional search intensity attributed to the unemployed in response to the Great Recession. While their search intensity depends on a number of factors that would predict otherwise, such as the odds of finding work, one argument shows promise: the search costs that accumulate over an expected long period of unemployment make a job more valuable during recessions. I estimate the elasticity of the value of a job to changes in labor productivity to be at least 0.67 and at most -0.04.

Author(s): Leyva Gustavo     

Summary: This paper models Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as one of the outputs that results from a firm's decisions regarding what and how to produce. The framework developed allows for studying technical efficiency and deriving a system of internal shadow prices to quantify the value of implementing socially responsible activities. The empirical application focuses on the food and beverage manufacturing sector worldwide. The results indicate high levels of technical efficiency in this sector and document a positive average shadow price of CSR activities, implying that the net value of implementing this kind of activities is positive to the firm as their benefit exceeds the cost. In particular, it is shown that increasing the CSR engagement at the margin positively contributes to the creation of firm value, while reducing it has a negative marginal impact.

Author(s): Puggioni Daniela; Stefanou Spiro E.     

Summary: In this paper, we use geospatial data and difference-in-differences models to identify the deforestation effects, during 2000-2013, of the leading forest policies in the Peruvian Amazon: i) logging concessions, ii) third-party certification of concessions, and iii) Protected Areas (PAs). We find that on average logging concessions have no effect on tree-cover loss, while the PAs do reduce loss. Further, the PAs allowing limited private extraction save more forest than do more restrictive PAs. Certification has an impact (reduces loss) only in the single region where concessions reduce loss, suggesting a complementarity of third parties with private and public efforts to govern concessions. Our results suggest roles for private rights within conservation, given oversight.

Author(s): Rico Jimena; Panlasigui Stephanie; Loucks Colby J.; Swenson Jennifer; Pfaff Alexander     

Summary: Based on satellite photos of night light from NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense, and using the methodology proposed by Henderson, Storeygard and Weil (2012), this paper measures the economic growth of the main 15 beach tourist areas in Mexico for the period from 1993 to 2017. This methodology opens a new series of opportunities to measure economic activity, by providing new tools for measurement at the regional level, regardless of administrative boundaries.

Author(s): Llamosas-Rosas Irving; Rangel González Erick; Sandoval Bustos Maritza     

Summary: The article studies the macroeconomic impact of oil price changes in 17 highly heterogeneous countries classified in six groups: advanced, emerging, oil producer, non-oil producers, with energy price controls and without energy price controls. The results show that despite analyzed countries differ in several dimensions, most differences regarding oil price shocks impacts can be captured comparing two groups: advanced vs. emerging. Moreover, most of the differences in the way countries react to oil price shocks come from the source of the shock rather than by the group which the countries belong to. Remarkably, there are no significant differences in the response of industrial production between oil and non-oil producer countries. We posit, as potential explanations of the later finding the decline in the energy intensity of the global economy and the degree of trade openness.

Author(s): Guerrero Santiago; Hernández del Valle Gerardo; Hernández Vega Marco A.     

Summary: In this article we study the market duration of new housing built by developers in Mexico between 2013 and 2015. In particular, this document discusses whether the physical characteristics of housing, state of location, date put on sale, time of construction, the initial price and the size of the developer have any effect on the duration of new houses in the market. We use a survival analysis Cox model. The most important results indicate that the probability of a new house being sold between t and t+1 (hazard rate) decreases with time and, in general, is lower for units of larger size, those that took much time on the construction process, and those constructed by small developers.

Author(s): Rodríguez-Zamora Carolina; Morales Ramírez Alejandro     

Summary: Using an up-to-date database that improves the identification of the destination of the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) among Mexican states and spatial panel econometric models that quantify the potential interactions and spillover effects, we analyze the main characteristics that help understand the regional distribution of manufacturing FDI in Mexico. Our main findings indicate the presence of a positive spatial relationship among states' FDI; for example, a higher investment creates a positive spillover effect on neighboring states' FDI and positive direct and indirect effects of human capital, agglomeration and states' fiscal margin. Based on the results of this research, key implications for public policy oriented to strengthen the FDI reside in increasing the average education level and improving tax revenue of Mexican states.

Author(s): Fonseca Felipe J.; Llamosas-Rosas Irving     

Summary: This paper evaluates five Nowcasting models that forecast Mexico's quarterly GDP: a Dynamic Factor Model (MFD), two Bridge Equation Models (BE) and two Principal Components Models (PCA). The results indicate that the average of the BE forecasts is statistically better than the rest of the models under consideration, according to the Diebold-Mariano (1995) accuracy test. In addition, using real-time information, the BE average is found to be more accurate than the median of the forecasts provided by the analysts surveyed by Bloomberg and the median of the experts who answer Banco de México's Survey of Professional Forecasters.

Author(s): Gálvez-Soriano Oscar de Jesús     

Summary: We consider the problem of matching a set of medical students to a set of medical residency positions (hospitals) under the assumption that hospitals' preferences over groups of students are responsive. In this context, we study the preference revelation game induced by the student proposing deferred acceptance mechanism. We show that the acyclicity of the hospitals' preference profile (Romero-Medina and Triossi, 2013a) is a necessary and sufficient condition to ensure that the outcome of every Nash equilibrium in which each hospital plays a dropping strategy is stable.

Author(s): Tello Benjamín     

Summary: This paper examines how the 1990s capital account liberalization policy trend affected international capital flows, and tests a new hypothesis that the depth and efficiency of the domestic financial system impacts the efficacy of capital account policy. The paper exploits a recently published IMF database on financial development that spans the period 1980-2014 and includes both developing and developed countries. The results confirm that policy on average does not have a significant effect on gross capital flows, when controlling for other factors. I also find no effect on flows disaggregated by type and direction. However, interacting capital account policy and financial development, I do find that for financially developed countries, policy has the expected effect --policy openness leads to capital flows. The implication is that the effectiveness of capital account liberalization requires developing the domestic financial system.

Author(s): Ramsay Bush Georgia